Soundtrack composer Alexandre Desplat

Composer Alexandre Desplat has a number of films running at the Cannes Film Festival 2012, notably “Moonrise Kingdom” and “Rust & Bone”. He has been called a worthy successor to the French masters of film music such as Delerue, Duhamel, Jarre and Legrand. His scores for “Read my Lips/Sur me slèvres” and “The Prophet” directed by Jacques Audiard established his credibility in French Cinema. He then went on to score “The Girl with the Pearl Earring”, “Birth” and “Syriana”.

His innovative voice launched Desplat as one of the most active European composers in Hollywood. He won a Cesar and the Berlinale Silver bear for his score to “The Beat my Heart Skipped” in 2006, the Golden Globe 2007 for “The Painted Veil” and received 3 nominations at the Oscars in 2007 for “The Queen”, in 2008 for “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” and in 2009 for “The Fantastic Mr. Fox”.

Desplat will be hosting a masterclass, dubbed “A Personal History of Film Music”, at 2.30pm in the Theatre Bunuel on May 19, 2012.

ECSA, the European Composer & Songwriter Alliance, has denounced the coercion that composers face from TV and film producers in February 2012. To participate in the revenue stream, many producers are demanding the publishing rights of music – and sometimes the total copyright – before using writers. In the above video, John Groves talks in detail about the issue, and how the industry has come to this situation.

“People are scared,” he said during the conference, pointing to the difficulty ECSA had in obtaining information from composers about the issue. He also noted that some composers have now started seeing payments for the rights, although it looks as though this comes from the overall budget anyway. Read the rest of this entry…

Strictly Confidential, one of Europe’s leading music publishers, represents the music of the film “The Artist” worldwide, as part of its publishing collaboration with Thomas Langmann’s French production company LA PETITE REINE.

After notable international successes with films such as “Asterix & Obelix at the Olympics” and “Mesrine”, “The Artist” has been beating records for La Petite Reine in the number of nominations – and notably for music. A triple award winner at the Golden Globes, “The Artist” has now been nominated in ten categories at the Oscars, Césars and picked up awards at the Baftas. The interest has caused the movie to be re-released in Belgium, notably.
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The annual Midem trade fair in Cannes features a number of pitch sessions. Advertisers such as EuroRSCG and Ogilvy provided briefings for upcoming campaigns.

On the TV front, music supervisors for NBCUniversal were overwhelmed by the response to one pitch they posted when over 2,000 tracks flooded their inbox. With a choice like that, they eventually found what they were looking for. But supervisor Alicen Schneider had this to say about the incoming music pitches: “a large number of the postings contained more songs than were feasible to review given the sheer number that awaited us and were also from genres that a little research would have shown are not right for any of our current shows (gospel, children’s songs, novelty….).”

The message is clear. Don’t waste the supervisors’ time. They are not going to change the brief due to the fact that you didn’t adhere to it! It doesn’t work that way round! One Pitch session is still open: agency Grey is looking for music for a worldwide campaign for a pain-killer. Check the details here. Deadline January 25. Midem will be held between January 28 and 31.

Atlantic Screen Composers (ASC) will go to the Cannes Film Festival 2011 armed with a huge investment fund, ready to inject much needed finance into film music. Set up in January 2011 to produce and finance music scores, it has funded 5 films and two animation series to date and projects that it will fund between 40 and 60 feature films during the forthcoming year, ASC will invest between $30,000 and $350,000 in individual productions in return for music publishing rights.

ASC is a fund associated and managed by the two founders of Atlantic Screen Music, former Pathe Entertainment FD Simon Fawcett and Tim Hollier, who built the world’s biggest independent film music publisher Filmtrax PLC.
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News that will surely interest music supervisors is that Harmonix Music Systems, makers of the “Rock Band” music video game franchise has been bought back with the support of an investment firm. Viacom Inc. announced that it has sold the company  to Harmonix-SBE Holdings LLC, an affiliate of Columbus Nova, LLC. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

A comment on the company site states, “We’re excited to be returning to our roots as an independent and privately owned studio. As for what it means for fans, the DLC schedule marches on for Rock Band, we will continue our support of previously released titles, and we’re hard at work on some unannounced projects.”

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